Town planning versus urbanismo

Abstract

The point of departure of this article is the contrast drawn by Giorgio Piccinato between ‘Anglo‐Saxon’ town planning and ‘Latin’ urbanism, one based on rational method and theory of planning as intervention, the other on architecture, urban morphology and project‐based action. Gordon Cherry and Oriol Bohigas represent the two poles of the dichotomy – Cherry because of the emphasis he placed on separation from architecture in the professional emergence of the UK’s Royal Town Planning Institute, Bohigas because of his equally insistent emphasis on reintegrating planning with its mother discipline. The paper sets Bohigas and the regeneration of Barcelona into the wider context of a postmodern urbanism troubled by the neighbouring internecine rivalry between modernist and traditionalist architects. It is argued that Barcelona’s most distinctive contribution is less the replacement of ‘plans’ by ‘projects’ than its reconciliation of modernism and contextualism, a lesson duly acknowledged in the Anglo‐Saxon planning world through an award of the RIBA Gold Medal. This narrative of the triumph of urbanism ends with the RTPI’s acceptance that making place and mediating space are at the heart of town planning.

Acknowledgement

This paper is an edited version of the Gordon Cherry Memorial Lecture delivered at the Eleventh Conference of the International Planning History Society in Barcelona in July 2004. The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Thanks with the usual disclaimers to Luis‐Felipe Alonso Teixidor, Rob Freestone, Ian Goldring, Ramón Lopéz de Lucio, Francisco‐Javier Monclús, Roger Simmonds, and the editor and anonymous reviewers of Planning Perspectives; and to Zoe Wilkinson (RIBA) and Judy Woollett (RTPI) for assistance with images.

Notes

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5. G. E. Cherry, The Evolution of British Town Planning. Leighton Buzzard: Leonard Hill, 1974, p.201.

6. See especially the concluding ‘Overview: Planning and the Profession’, ibid., pp. 241–59.

7. He had a powerful sense of this reformist legacy, being as active the Bournville Village Trust (trustee, chairman 1992–6) as he was in the Royal Town Planning Institute (service on its Council for a quarter of a century, Presidency 1978–9, Outstanding Service Medal 1995).

8. G. E. Cherry, The Politics of Town Planning. London: Longman, 1982, p. 147.

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11. From a first‐year planning undergraduate exam script at a (nameless) British university.

12. Homepage of the IPHS: http://www.iphs.org

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14. Ibid., p. 249.

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62. P. G. Rowe, Civic Realism. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1997. See also, for Gruppo 7, J. Loach, QT8: a neglected chapter in the history of modern town planning, in T. Dekker (ed.) The Modern City Revisited. London: Spon, 2000, pp. 125–149, particularly p. 132.

63. P. Drew, Real Space: the architecture of Martorell Bohigas Mackay Puigdomènech. Berlin: Wasmuth, 1993; K. Frampton, Prospects for a Critical Regionalism, in K. Nesbitt (ed.) Theorizing A New Agenda for Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996, pp. 330–45.

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65. O. Bohigas, Ten Points on an Urbanistic Methodology. Journal of Architecture 4, 3 (1999) 240–4. See also the collected essays published as O. Bohigas, Contra la Incontinencia Urbana: reconsideración moral de la arquitectura y la Ciudad. Barcelona: Electa, 2004.

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68. S. V. Ward, op. cit. [3], pp. 317–8.

69. His paper to the RIBA Annual Conference, Bristol, Saturday 2 July 2005 was sandwiched between those of Americans Martha Schwartz and Hank Dittmar.

70. http://www.cabe.org.uk.

71. For which, see the activities and journal of the Urban Design Group: http://www.udg.org.uk.

72. For the membership and activities of the Urban Design Alliance (UDAL), see http://www.udal.org.uk.

73. RTPI, Education Commission Final Report. London: Royal Town Planning Institute, especially section 4.

74. P. Newman and A. Thornley, op. cit. [20], pp. 128–35.

75. G. E. Cherry, Birmingham, a Study in Geography, History and Planning. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1994, pp. 222–3.

76. N. Corbett, Transforming Cities: Revival in the Square. London: RIBA, 2004, pp. 131–54.

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Notes on contributors

Michael Hebbert

*Michael Hebbert teaches town planning at the University of Manchester and was formerly at the London School of Economics and Oxford Brookes. He edits Progress in Planning and is active with the Urban Design Group, the journal Municipal Engineer and the Ancoats Buildings Preservation Trust. He read history at Merton College Oxford and came to town planning through a PhD on planners’ use of social science under Sir Peter Hall in the department of geography at Reading. Gordon Cherry acted as external examiner and subsequent mentor. Michael Hebbert was a founder member of the Planning History Group and has served on its council through its successful mutation into IPHS. Alongside a continuing interest in planning history, his research has addressed the concept of regionalism through studies of decentralization in Spain, European integration and sub‐state government, the erratic course of UK regionalism and the dramas of metropolitan London between 1986 and 2000. In 1998 he was awarded a two‐year fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 to begin a study of urbanism, focusing particularly on the street and the contemporary efforts to retrieve its function as a liveable public realm.